This book is the product of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Grant entitled ‘Entertainment Rights in the Age of the Franchise’ (DP0985948). We thank the ARC for its financial support and Leanne Palmer at UNSW for her administration of the grant over a number of years. The collection of essays in this book is largely based on a series of papers delivered at a workshop entitled ‘Culture Industries and the Franchise’, held in Sydney in July 2011. We thank the participants at the workshop for all their work – for embracing the themes of our project, for their generosity in commenting on each other’s papers at the workshop and for their efforts in turning their workshop papers into the chapters in this collection. We are also grateful to Angela Sutton for her assistance in organizing the workshop. Thanks go to the participants at the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) workshops at Universit` a Bocconi, Milan in June 2009 andUniversit´e Panth´eon Assas (Paris 2) in June 2013 for their helpful feedback on the papers we presented at those workshops, which helped influence our own chapters in this collection. Thanks also to the numerous colleagues with whom we have discussed our ideas over the course of this project, including Catherine Bond, Jason Bosland, Robert Burrell, Lesley Hitchens, Jill McKeough, Albert Moran, Joellen Riley, Brad Sherman, Kim Weatherall, and the Australian lawyers, entertainment industry professionals and agents we spoke to in 2011 and 2012. Sincere thanks go to our team of UNSW research assistants who have worked on our franchise project since 2009 – Louise Buckingham, Sophia Christou, Lizzie Fuller, Marie Hadley and Bailee Walker – for their diligence and for helping shape the contours of the project. We also express our gratitude to Jennifer Kwong from UNSW, and Kim Hughes, Richard Woodham and Jo Breeze from Cambridge University Press, for their excellent editorial work on this collection.